Advancing the digital agenda

A new space, a strong team and a host of projects ranging from historical newspapers to the Chinese-Canadian experience are some highlights of UBC Library’s burgeoning digital agenda.

“Things are really coming together,” says Allan Bell, Director of Library Digital Initiatives. “My goal is to help the Library be indispensable to teaching, research and learning at UBC, and make our collections and research available to the world.”

Bell has been busy building a Digital Initiatives Unit since joining UBC Library last year. That group, consisting of 11 members, features specialists in digitization, scholarly communications and cIRcle, UBC’s information repository.

Some are housed in the Digitization Centre, a new space adjacent to Rare Books and Special Collections in the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre. It features workstations and scanners for digitization projects, and UBC students will assist staff with tasks such as scanning, image processing and quality control.

One of the unit’s top priorities concerns preservation – a pressing issue in the digital age. The unit has begun working with Artefactual Systems Inc., a new Westminster, B.C. company, to develop a digital preservation strategy and determine the needed resources.

Another key focus has been the B.C. Historical newspapers project, which aims to digitize 24 of British Columbia’s earliest newspapers. When the pilot is complete, students, researchers and the public will have online access to about 60,000 pages of B.C. history.

Other priorities include Chinese Canadian Stories, an initiative funded by the federal government’s Community Historical Recognition Program; and the B.C. Bibliography project, a collaboration between UBC Library, Simon Fraser University, the University of Victoria, the University of northern British Columbia, UBC’s Okanagan campus, the Legislative Library of British Columbia and B.C. Archives.